Wireless networks that support multiple types of wireless devices, mobile, or otherwise, have become ubiquitous in many different types of environments. For example, wireless local area networks (WLANS) are now commonly used with many types of business and personal devices, including with mobile devices of cellular systems for data traffic offload when a mobile device of a cellular subscriber is operating in the coverage area of an available WLAN. WLAN environments may include, for example, business environments in which a large number of employees using many different types of devices are supported, commercial establishments having Wi-Fi hotspots supporting customer devices, or home WLAN environments in which multiple computing devices, gaming devices, and smart televisions may be supported. Other examples of wireless networks that are commonly used include long term evolution (LTE) networks that currently form the major portion of cellular subscriber networks providing phone and data services.
A mobile device and its associated infrastructure may potentially be required to transmit and receive data traffic for a number of device applications that may be running concurrently on the mobile device. The increase in the number and in the types of mobile devices that support increasingly sophisticated device applications requires that wireless networks will need to support high speed data traffic, at higher traffic volumes, while providing a level of service and performance that is satisfactory for the users on a network.
In one example of current high speed data service implementation, WLAN and LTE networks have been implemented using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). In OFDM each channel used for transmission includes multiple orthogonal frequency subcarriers (subcarriers that do not interfere with one another because of orthogonality). In OFDM each subcarrier may be used to carry a separate data stream. While the subcarriers of an OFDM channel may not interfere with one another, the OFDM subcarriers may still be susceptible to interference from transmissions made on OFDM channels that are adjacent to the OFDM channel to which the OFDM subcarriers belong.